User talk:GConcilio94

Wiki Exercise #1: Educational Assignment
Deviantart is the world’s biggest social network for art. It started out as a small website but now it counts more than 35 million registered members. Differently from many other social networks, Deviantart attracts a very specific type of users: people who share the passion for any kind of art. This “natural selection” ensured the birth of a very close and loyal community, where everyone is welcome and where people can really feel affinity with each other.

The best aspect of Deviantart is that, differently from Facebook and other social networks, people do not suffer abuse, negative comments are rare and artists never try to push down other artists. Deviantart is similar in many aspects with other SNS, for instance it has a chatroom, a forum, a profile picture; you can comment people’s posts and pictures or like them, you can write your own thoughts on your journal and let people see what you think or what is happening to you, what you’re listening to etc., despite this Deviants (Deviantart’s members) rather construct their identities and narratives through their art. Social Networks’ users are driven by the impulse of creating a better self, an internet persona that might represent an ideal version of themselves. When it comes to Deviantart, users seem to take the concept of online identity from a different perspective. The identity is not that of a human being, people do not want to focus on the artist’s life but they want to focus on his/her work, therefore users do not need to put a filter on their lives hence being able to have more freedom about what they want to show to the world. This is the aspect that probably I like the most about Deviantart, the fact that people can have an artistic identity that does not adapt to the standards of the traditional art world is dazzling. In fact, the common perception of artist is conferred by the education system or by institutions related to the fine arts, but in the case of this ‘online art gallery’ amateur and professional artist have the same relevance and the same opportunities.

In my opinion what makes Deviantart an excellent resource for those who want to make art and love art is the great graphic of the website itself, all the features available for users but foremost the great sense of community that members have been able to create in the last sixteen years.

GConcilio94 (discuss • contribs) 13:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments
Very interesting! I do not have a DeviantArt because while I enjoy craft and being creative, I don't have time to make lots of fun art very often :( I totally would get one if I had the time though! Perhaps I should. Just a wee suggestion: if you don't know how to break text up into paragraphs, you need to press enter twice, and this will paragraph your work. Good job though! Carys the Hat (discuss • contribs) 13:50, 16 February 2016 (UTC)


 * You don't have to post your art very often and you can just use it to store your favourite artists and favourite drawings for example, that's what I do most of the time. Thank you for your suggestion! GConcilio94 (discuss • contribs) 16:14, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

This is really interesting, I've only heard of Deviantart in passing and never really looked into it. I'm not overly 'arty' myself but it sounds like a fresh way to display work. Is it necessary to be an artist and post to join this? Do you post often on Deviantart yourself or are you more a curator? I think the idea of an online identity portrayed through art is particularly interesting. Do people tend not to put pictures of themselves on the website and hide their 'real' identity?

I feel that the reason this site is not as prone to hate or spam in comparison to other social media websites is perhaps because it is more anonymous and less well known, therefore has formed a close community in which people are treated equally - as people cannot be judged with their identities being unknown. One of the quotes from David Gauntlett comes to mind: "‘If the Web becomes a place where people are not typically creative, where the anticipated mode of engagement is consumption rather than creativity, then it will have become an industrial tool, and its positive potential will be destroyed.’ I think because Deviantart has all of this creativity and users (from what i know) tend not to be passive, that there is much more positivity within the site than other social media. Well known websites like youtube seem to be prone to hate because a large majority of its users are consumers and not creators themselves. Perhaps if users of Youtube were encouraged to create content themselves - like Deviantart seems to - this would get rid of many hateful comments. CwazyChris (discuss • contribs) 14:44, 18 February 2016 (UTC)


 * You don't need to be an artist to join it, you can just participate as a spectator and you can collect your favourite artists and their works in the "Favourites" section. I don't post my works very often, I would say once every three months because I'd rather have a gallery made out of my best drawings than a gallery with every single thing I draw. I select my drawings and photos very carefully because of course I want to show the best of me.

Some people use themselves as models for their artistic photos, in fact there is an entire section of the website dedicated to self-portraits. In this kind of pictures they usually don't show who they really are, the focus is on the picture as a whole artistic work rather than on the model, the fact that the model is also the photographer doesn't really matter. So, even though they put pictures of themselves in a certain way they still hide their real identity. GConcilio94 (discuss • contribs) 21:19, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise 1: Formative Feedback
Your review of Deviantart offers an introduction to the social network and is generally well written. At times you are rather uncritical of Deviantart by stating that negative comments are rare and that Deviantart is an entirely happy place. These claims need evidence to support them. Your post would also benefit from a greater range of wiki markup other than the link at the beginning. Your comments to colleagues are enthusiastic but could be more substantial, and engage with the material critically.

A post of this standard roughly corresponds to the following grade descriptor: Good. Among other things, good entries will make a clear point in a clear way. They will relate concepts to original examples in a straightforward fashion. They will make effective use of the possibilities of the form (including links, as well as perhaps copyright-free videos and images, linked to from Wiki Commons). They may also demonstrate module's themes and concerns, and are likely to show evidence of reading and thinking about the subject material. The wiki markup formatting will be very clear. Sprowberry (discuss • contribs) 09:52, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your feedback. I will try to improve my future contributions. GConcilio94 (discuss • contribs) 20:04, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Wiki Exercise #2: Visibility and Online Footprint
If you had asked me about online visibility five years ago, I would have probably answered that it was not so important to be careful about what we decide to share with the online community. Now, I have changed my mind about it: in fact, as this new digital world has exponentially grown, people started to use it more and more for different reasons among which job related reasons. Indeed, social networks are now one of the most used and effective tools to expand our job opportunities. Therefore what we decide to post online, the way we decide to perform our identity and the way we take care of our privacy does not only affect the way our friends or families perceive us, but it might affect our future career as well. Online visibility helps us building our reputation and our chances to get the job we want so it is important to understand that when we decide to share something online we must think about the consequences of doing so as it can make us vulnerable.

Personally, I have accounts on quite a lot of online platforms including Facebook, Instagram, DeviantArt, Last.fm, Google +, YouTube, Viki, CouchSurfing, Skype and other academic platforms such as the University Portal and ResearchGate. I used to have a twitter account as well but I have decided to delete it, as I have never really used it. Above these, I mainly use Facebook, the University Portal and Deviantart. As for the first two, I use my real name while for the Deviantart I use a username and I have almost no personal info about me.

I will try to explain how visible I am online and how I try to control my personal information by taking as an example Facebook.

FACEBOOK
I use Facebook almost every day, mostly to talk with my friends. Sometimes I post photos and videos from YouTube, but apart from that, I do not usually overshare my thoughts on it. I have a lot personal information on it, I have my real name, my hometown, information related to my education or where I live now, I have my skype id, my date of birth and even my phone number. One way of being in control of these data is to change the privacy settings, that is what I did and now only my friends can see my personal details and my posts. I also get notifications when someone tries to add something on my timeline or tag me in some pictures and then I can decide whether to give my permission or not so I can also control the content that other users want to show on my page. Even though Facebook offers these tools to help you protect your privacy, it also collects all your data, tracks everything you do and you watch and uses this information to target advertising. You cannot take control of this kind of information. Facebook also collects web-browsing data for safety reasons, but soon it will be able to use the information about what we do outside of Facebook for advertising. What we do on Facebook or on the internet creates a digital footprint, a passive one, as we cannot control those data. The information we decide to share constitute the active digital footprint but it is only a small amount of data compared to the passive one.

Final Thoughts
In conclusion, I believe that we should not only be careful about what we deliberately post online, but we should also consider that everything we do online can be recorded even when we are not aware of it and that we don’t know how our data are going to be used.

In addition, a research about Americans’ attitudes about privacy shows that more than the 66% of adults say that they are not sure if social media sites, online video sites, online advertisers etc. will keep their record private and secure. If so many people cannot trust the way online platforms take care of our privacy, what can these platforms do in order to become more trustworthy?

Wiki Exercise #4: Wikibook Project Reflective Account
According to Bereiter and Scardamalia, the Knowledge Building theory describes what a community of learners has to do in order to construct knowledge for the benefit of the whole community. In the last few years, the development of new information and communication technology has enhanced the process of knowledge building. The web especially plays a big role in creating a Knowledge Society where the members work together with the aim of sharing their knowledge and making it available to anyone for the sake of improving the human condition. The learning and sharing process becomes easier and takes over a bigger scale of users thanks to platforms like Wikipedia, which has become so successful that it inspired many people to apply this kind of platform in educational contexts as well.

Wikis are more than a piece of software technology – they stand for a constructivist view of learning, one that defines knowledge building as a socio-cognitive process between individuals and groups.

Ideally, a Wiki is a perfect platform for externalizing students’ knowledge and documenting their ability to work in a group project. It is fairly easy to create content, add hyperlinks, delete and modify parts on a wiki, making it a very accessible tool for everybody. However it is hard to make people co-operate in perfect harmony thus, the process of Knowledge Building can face few obstacles.

Knowledge Building Principles
Scardamalia suggested twelve principles that should be followed in order to facilitate the development of Knowledge building. Her aim is not to present us with a check-list of things to do, but to give us a starting point from which we can improve. In relation to this project, we encountered some difficulties in dealing with some of these principles particularly.

Epistemic Agency: participants recognize both a personal and a collective responsibility for success of knowledge building efforts. They offer ideas and negotiate in order to build something good and they do not expect other people to delineate a course for them. It is indeed very hard to achieve a perfect co-operation within such a big group of people; a good communication implies that everyone starts working on the project at the same time. Otherwise, the latecomers will not be able to express in depth their ideas and will have to put up with the work that has already been outlined by the rest of the group. By saying this, I do not want to justify nor criticize anyone’s behaviour but I want to highlight the difficulty of finding a good balance and dividing the responsibilities within each member of the group.

Community Knowledge and Democratizing Knowledge: “knowledge building has its aim to produce knowledge of value to others. [..] All participants are legitimate contributors to the shared goals of the community; all take pride in knowledge advances achieved by the group.” As we all knew this project would constitute an important part of our grade, it was hard to keep in mind the common goal of producing valuable knowledge. However, the fact that we were driven by the impulse of getting a good grade did not necessarily affect the value of the content we produced, but I wonder if we can consider it as a product of a knowledge building community when we wanted to claim ideas as ours and not as part of something bigger. As Carr states, the discourse of the individual is still strong in education.

Face-to-face interaction
Despite few glitches, I do believe that using Wikibooks as a tool for knowledge building helped in eliminating some problematic factors that we can easily encounter in face-to-face interaction, like scheduling conflicts. It also helped us overcoming “issues of working with unfamiliar people” as it easier to speak up for ourselves in an online context. In addition, “the ability to see who was contributing, how much and how often” can encourage students’ sense of responsibility. Moreover, being able to look at other groups’ work was beneficial as we could see how others were approaching the topic chosen, whereas in a face-to-face meeting it would be impossible to meet 20 or more students to see how they are dealing with the project.

In conclusion, wikis represent a good alternative to face-to-face meetings; for sure, we can overcome many logistic problems that we would have to face otherwise. However, it is hard to create a good environment and subsequently a knowledge society. Additionally, in the process of knowledge building we have to keep in mind that we might not be an idealistic society, therefore we may not be able to meet all the required principles created by Scardamalia but we still might be able to create valuable knowledge.

Comments
well built comment, showing you knowledge and understanding of the Wiki Exercises, discussions and contributions. You also managed to relate this to a critical concept from the module. However, I wonder what would have happened if the Wiki tasks involved writing/discussing in here but at the same time trying to use Viber/Whats App for communication in real time, as these two are widely used among students. What do you think? Gvg00001 (discuss • contribs) 11:23, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Even though they are widely use you cannot expect all the students to have an account on any of these apps and as we would have to join these platforms by using phone numbers some privacy problems may arise. Some students might not want to share their private phone numbers with strangers. We also have to consider that WhatsApp is not completely free and asking students to pay in order to be involved in an assignment is not too fair in my opinion. In addition, wouldn't it be too hard to answer just to just one user in a group chat? The comment would get lost in the conversation and it would be hard to talk about different topics all at the same time; whereas on wikibooks it is easy to navigate through separate topics and write comments just in a specific section. However, there might be some advantages in using whatsapp or viber, for instance they are easy to use and students are more likely to check whatsapp rather than wikibooks. GConcilio94 (discuss • contribs) 13:40, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Your argument was very well formulated and I agree with a lot of it. The group work was indeed a challenge at times as many of us were working for our own individual ways, and the way you backed up your argument with the knowledge building principles works very well. I feel like Wikibooks would work more if it wasn't people trying achieve an individual grade, for that makes working with a group of 20 people more calm and less competitive. However, I agree with you that Wikibooks makes it slightly more easy to work with such a large amount of people. Marinieuw (discuss • contribs) 10:04, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you when you say that if people would stop thinking about their grades, wikibooks could be a more relaxed environment. On the other hand, if the students' work doesn't get acknowledged through grades how can you make sure that they will take the project seriously? In that case, only people who are really interested in the topic would try to do a good job and the rest of the students would probably give up on it without even trying. This problem could be solved by making smaller groups and grading the group instead of giving different grades to each student. In this way people would try to get along with each other and work together with the same aim. GConcilio94 (discuss • contribs) 18:27, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

Marker’s Feedback on Wikibook Project Work
You demonstrate a good level of engagement with colleagues through responses to their posts and throughout the talk pages on the wikibook chapter. There is clear evidence of collaboration beyond simply claiming territory and otherwise ignoring colleagues. Both the exercises and chapter show a good understanding of module themes, but this should be supplmented by further secondary reading.

Content (weighted 20%)

 * Your contribution to the book page gives a good brief overview of the subject under discussion in your chosen themed chapter. There is a good range of concepts associated with your subject, and the effort to deliver critical definitions, drawing from relevant literature and scholarship, and your own critical voice in the building of a robust argument is very much in evidence. The primary and secondary sources you found about the chapter’s themes cover a good range and depth of subject matter.

Understanding (weighted 30%)

 * Reading and research:
 * evidence of critical engagement with set materials, featuring discriminating command of a comprehensive  range of relevant materials and analyses
 * evidence of independent reading of appropriate academic and peer-reviewed material to an exemplary level
 * Argument and analysis:
 * well-articulated and well-supported argument through considered judgement relating to key issues, concepts or procedures
 * exemplary evidence of critical thinking (through taking a position in relation to key ideas from the module, and supporting this position);
 * comprehensive evidence of relational thinking (through making connections between key ideas from the module and wider literature, and supporting these connections);
 * considerable evidence of independent critical ability

Engagement (weighted 50%)

 * Evidence from contributions to both editing and discussion of content of an exemplary quality (i.e. volume and breadth of activity as evidenced through contribs)
 * Excellent levels of engagement with and learning from other Wikipedians about the task of writing/editing content for a Wikibook
 * Reflexive, creative and well-managed use of discussion pages using deployment of considered  judgement relating to key issues, concepts and procedures

Overall Mark % available on Succeed

FMSU9A4marker (discuss • contribs) 14:44, 3 May 2016 (UTC)